So I wanted to set up a vista ultimate dual boot again at the weekend.
My drives were still partitioned from the last time I did it so:-
Drive 1 – 500 gb Seagate
C: = 20gb = xp
D: = 40 gb = vista
F : = 400 gb = data
Drive 2 - 500 gb Western digital
E : = 460 gb = data
So I initially did it from xp desktop but it failed when uncompressing so I tried from boot and selected the 40 gb drive which I had labelled vista from last time I had it set up
When it got nearly all the way through the installation, the machine got stuck in a reboot cycle and would not work.
I rebooted into xp to be greeted with a disk check on e: which went of for a good hour with lots of info flashing up too fast to read as it made corrections.
Not good I thought so I was worried when I booted into xp but all seemed fine with the directory structure intact.
It was only later on when I was looking for something I found that all the dir’s and files were there but the files were all 0 k large and the drive was only showing as 40 Gb. I looked in disk management and partition magic and neither were reporting any unallocated space so where was the 400+ gig, never mind what has happened to my files! Running easy recovery pro or recovermyfiles didn’t work as they were only seeing 40 gb.
Looking at the disks in device manager they are both showing as identical, how?
They were also reported as identical in the bios.
So after some investigation involving unplugging drives and resetting bios etc, I found that there was some sort of vista install on e: but I definitely did not choose this. Even if I did, it surely wouldn’t have defaulted to 40 gb?
Perhaps something went wrong as looking back, if I tried to install vista from boot on drive 1 then that would’ve meant two active partitions on that disk I think. I should’ve realized that one.
I used acronis disk management to deleted the 40 gb on drive 2 and I was then able to create the full 460 gb partition and format in mmc disk management
Now I am left trying to recover my data using the programs above from a formatted drive.
Can anyone explained what happened? Particularly how the vista install not only decided to jump partitions but also disks
it was an oem vista ultimate btw.
My drives were still partitioned from the last time I did it so:-
Drive 1 – 500 gb Seagate
C: = 20gb = xp
D: = 40 gb = vista
F : = 400 gb = data
Drive 2 - 500 gb Western digital
E : = 460 gb = data
So I initially did it from xp desktop but it failed when uncompressing so I tried from boot and selected the 40 gb drive which I had labelled vista from last time I had it set up
When it got nearly all the way through the installation, the machine got stuck in a reboot cycle and would not work.
I rebooted into xp to be greeted with a disk check on e: which went of for a good hour with lots of info flashing up too fast to read as it made corrections.
Not good I thought so I was worried when I booted into xp but all seemed fine with the directory structure intact.
It was only later on when I was looking for something I found that all the dir’s and files were there but the files were all 0 k large and the drive was only showing as 40 Gb. I looked in disk management and partition magic and neither were reporting any unallocated space so where was the 400+ gig, never mind what has happened to my files! Running easy recovery pro or recovermyfiles didn’t work as they were only seeing 40 gb.
Looking at the disks in device manager they are both showing as identical, how?
They were also reported as identical in the bios.
So after some investigation involving unplugging drives and resetting bios etc, I found that there was some sort of vista install on e: but I definitely did not choose this. Even if I did, it surely wouldn’t have defaulted to 40 gb?
Perhaps something went wrong as looking back, if I tried to install vista from boot on drive 1 then that would’ve meant two active partitions on that disk I think. I should’ve realized that one.
I used acronis disk management to deleted the 40 gb on drive 2 and I was then able to create the full 460 gb partition and format in mmc disk management
Now I am left trying to recover my data using the programs above from a formatted drive.
Can anyone explained what happened? Particularly how the vista install not only decided to jump partitions but also disks
it was an oem vista ultimate btw.